hips don't lie: Discovering Formentera, the island that Frank Lampard and Christine Bleakley fell in love with

By

Arnie Wilson

PUBLISHED:

04:49 EST, 14 July 2013

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UPDATED:

04:50 EST, 14 July 2013

It doesn’t always take a passenger jet flying at 500mph to bring a change of pace and a change of scene. Within the space of ten nautical miles or so, the boisterous ambience of Ibiza will vanish as your ferry swings into La Savina, the laidback port of the tiny Mediterranean island of Formentera.

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Happy drifting: The distinctive Formentera shelters built by fishermen from driftwood to house their boats line a beach on the island

Of course you don’t have to take a ferry. Chelsea and England footballer Frank Lampard arrived with his fiancee Christine Bleakley on a yacht during our stay to visit one of the island’s trendiest restaurants, Juan y Andreas. Meanwhile the Hotel Cala Saona, overlooking a secluded cove, was once a secret bolt-hole for Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, who also arrived discreetly by yacht.

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Stroll on the sand: Frank Lampard and fiancee Christine Bleakley in Formentera last month

Excellent restaurants and cafes abound on Formentera – we barely scratched the surface – but go back a couple of generations and it’s said that if you asked what a traditional local dish was, the answer would come back ‘hunger’.

Ibiza’s main harbour is large, with countless yachts moored there. These yachts need somewhere to sail to, and Formentera – just 12 miles long and eight miles wide – is an obvious destination for a day out.

Formentera is so close to Ibiza that

you almost expect to hear a dozen discos pounding out across the water.

There is no such intrusion, mercifully, although as the season builds,

invaders do trickle in from the port (there’s no airport) by the busload

to Es Pujols, Formentera’s only tourist resort. By the evening they’ve

gone and peace returns, leaving tourists to ‘chill out’.

It’s

why so many choose to return. As Lesley, our Thomson rep, put it:

‘Visitors are enraptured by Formentera – once bitten, twice smitten.’

Just to make sure the island’s sandy beaches are in good condition,

they’re actually groomed each week. Along the beachfront you’ll see rows

of picturesque varaderos, the traditional shelters built by Balearic

fishermen from driftwood to house their boats.

While Ibiza is hilly, Formentera is pretty flat – apart from one steepish hill called La Mola which rises 390ft. The island is ideal for walking and cycling, especially on its maze of old footpaths, many leading to deserted coves.

Scooters are also popular, but you can’t help fearing for the safety of the girls wearing just bikinis as they ride pillion.

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Thirst quencher: Arnie stayed at the Hotel Tahiti…and enjoyed lunchtime mojitos

Although regular visitors, some of whom have been coming here for 20 or even 30 years, are anxious not to spread the word about their little piece of paradise, tourism has effectively saved Formentera, according to local journalist Josep ‘Pepo’ Rubio. Pepo makes ends meet by doubling as a local radio broadcaster and tour guide and, when I met him, he was about to do the commentary for the second leg of a play-off between the island’s football team and Santa María de Cayón from Cantabria in a bid to get promoted to the third tier of Spanish football.

Hopes were high among Formentera fans before the match, but the team lost by the odd goal. Where was Lampard when they needed him? There were compensations after the match: Formentera’s centre-forward José Manuel Cuevas Reina served us coffee at the bar where he works in the island’s capital, San Francesc. ‘In the old days, it was very difficult to survive here,’ says Pepo. ‘The soil is poor and only really supports fig trees, vines, olives and junipers.’

For a long time the only inhabitants were lizards. At various times there were raids by Vandals, Byzantines, Moors and Vikings, and Turkish pirates made it their base. But the Black Death took its toll, and it wasn’t until the late 17th Century that settlers started coming here from Ibiza to start a new life. They survived by living off the land, fishing and keeping goats and sheep.

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Shouldering the burden: A waiter pours wine at the Juan y andrea restaurant

In the last years of the 19th Century the economy failed and the menfolk started emigrating to the Americas – Argentina, Uruguay and Cuba. They would return every few years, but in the meantime Formentera became known as ‘women island’.

Pepo explains: ‘Until the early 1980s, production of high grade salt was the main industry that had to be exploded.’ (I think he meant ‘exploited’, as I pointed out good-naturedly). ‘People worked very hard, 12 hours a day in the baking sun, with only a straw hat to protect them.’

In some places on Formentera today, even straw hats would look out of place: nude bathing is popular and some beaches are taken over by naturists, many of whom sport elaborate tattoos.

Germans make up a goodly number of them, while Italians account for an estimated 75 per cent of all visitors to the island. The Italian skiing legend Alberto Tomba has a home here.

‘But the Italians don’t seem to be interested in the history of the island,’ says Pepo. ‘That’s disappointing because I spent a long time learning the script for my guided tours in Italian.’ Instead, they’re interested mainly in the island’s ‘feet in the sand’ restaurants and the bars. Unlike Ibiza, the bars here must close their doors after midnight so that music can only be heard inside.

During the Spanish civil war, Franco’s Nationalist forces used Formentera as a staging post for his bombing campaign against the Republicans along the nearby Valencian coastline. German seaplanes landed on the Estany Pudent salt lagoon to refuel, and hundreds of boxes of German bombs were hidden in the nearby woods. Later, there was even a concentration camp on the island which housed about 1,300 political prisoners. At least 58 died of malnutrition.

On one occasion, we were told, a donkey that had died was dug up and reburied in a pit of salt so that the meat wouldn’t be wasted.

During the Vietnam War, the island became a popular haunt with American draft-dodgers and hippies – and a handful stayed on. Back then there were no ferries to the island from Ibiza, and salt water ran in the taps. CND logos still abound, although more as trendy icons than serious rallying cries for nuclear disarmament.

Musicians have been inspired by the island’s ambience too: members of Pink Floyd spent time here, as did King Crimson, who wrote a song called Formentera Lady. Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Marley and Eric Clapton have all played here. The video for Chris Rea’s On The Beach was filmed in Formentera, but rumours that Bob Dylan wrote songs while living here in an ancient windmill are almost certainly a myth.

Formentera can certainly be a windy island – sometimes gusts threaten to uproot your parasol. Yet annoyingly, just when you are relying on a breeze to cool you after getting a little too much sun, they seem to die down.

Our excellent hotel, the Hotel Tahiti in Es Pujols, has the novel idea of serving breakfast-cumbrunch till noon. This means that you have time for an excursion – be it along walk, a bike ride, scooter or bus trip, or a morning swim – before sitting down to a richly varied meal which does the job of lunch if you want it to.

The hotel also provides a daily service of virtually unlimited water and soft drinks which are simply restocked in your room’s mini-bar. We spent almost every lunch time (and much of the remaining afternoon) sitting in beach chairs beneath a parasol at The People bar drinking mojitos and snacking on nuts. After such a huge and varied late breakfast, we weren’t really hungry for any-thing more substantial again until well into the afternoon.

But perhaps the island’s biggest strength is the locals. There must be more genuinely nice people per acre here than anywhere else in the Mediterranean.

Travel facts

Thomson (thomson.co.uk) offers seven nights’ BB at the Hotel Tahiti in Formentera in October from £665pp, including return flights from Luton to Ibiza and ferry transfers.